FIRST LOOK: Nest Cam Outdoor

Keep an eye on the outdoors

The Nest Cam (formerly the Dropcam Pro) is easily one of the most popular surveillance/streaming cameras on the market. Its ease of use and consistent quality have made it a go-to for families who want to keep an eye on their homes while they’re away (or maybe just find out which dog keeps tearing up the pillows).

The Nest Cam is so popular, in fact, that a whole cottage industry and community has developed around hacking them to work outdoors. From clunky 3rd-party cases to jamming them up against window frames, I’ve seen some creative hacks from folks who want to use their favorite camera outside as well.

It looks like the team at Nest has finally granted our smart home wishes with the Nest Cam Outdoor; the Nest Cam Outdoor combines the guts of the indoor Nest Cam with a new ruggedized enclosure and some machine-learning algorithms (borrowed from Google) to help you know the difference between a lurker in the bushes and a wind-blown pile of leaves.

The Nest Cam Outdoor also includes a pretty cool magnetic mount (which could make certain gutters a prime mounting location), but it does require a wired connection to power, which might rule out many of the places where you might like to use it; in my mind, Ring’s Stick Up Cam has a huge advantage here with its rechargeable battery leading to some more creative use cases.

For many folks, the weatherproof 1080p recording and ability to set the camera up for public live streaming is going to be a hugely tempting proposition when the Nest Cam Outdoor launches later this Fall. We hope to get a full hands-on soon! In the meantime, you can check out a full list of specs and preorder your camera at the link below:

Author

Eric Murrell

Eric is the creator of At Home in the Future and has been a passionate fan of the future since he was seven. He's a web developer by trade, and serves as the Director of Communication and Technology for a large church in Nashville, TN (where he and his family are building a high tech home in the woods).